Developing what John Keats described as negative capability can help students be more successful in college.
Having taught British Fantasy Literature for the first time last semester, I need to think back on it before it becomes a distant memory. By reflecting publicly, I can share some of the insights I gained from the course. Two major things I learned are that (1) fantasy is an oppositional genre—by which I […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Kubla Khan", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Lady of Shallot", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Alice in Wonderland Alice through the Looking Glass, Carl Jung, Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, fantasy, Geoffrey Chaucer, Goblin Market, Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, Hard Times, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Idylls of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien, James Barrie, Joseph Campbell, Jungle Books, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carol, Man and His Symbols, Midsummer Night's Dream, Rider Haggard, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, She, teaching, The Lord of the Rings, The Wind in the Willows, William Shakespeare | In Southern Maryland our eternal summer appears finally to be fading and the fall, my favorite season, is a’cumin in. To celebrate it, I am posting one of my favorite seasonal poems, John Keats’ “To Autumn” (1817). The poem takes on added significance as the news continues to get worse for my friend Alan. Despite […]
Sunday evenings are for visiting our friends Alan and Jackie. I feel blessed that Alan is sharing his dying with us and that I get to have with him the final conversations I did not have with Justin, my son who drowned. We don’t talk that much about death. Mostly we talk, as we always […]
Sometimes I will discover that two different works start talking to each other simply because I happen to be teaching them both at the same time. This week Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (from my Jane Austen first year seminar) and John Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes (from my British fantasy course) engaged in one of […]
Film Friday As this is Friday, I begin with a discussion of a film. But as it is also the tenth anniversary of the drowning death of my 21-year-old son Justin, I plan to digress. I trust you will allow me to embark on a bit of a ramble. The film I have chosen is […]
Snow is pounding us for the third time in two weeks and classes once again have been canceled. Significantly enough, I have been forced once again to postpone Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” queries Keats (although he’s asking from the vantage point of autumn, not that of […]
Reynold, “Portrait of Sterne” Just as I was born into a literary name, so were Darien and Toby. Before telling the story, I will follow up on the allusion in my last post to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy […]
